The Friend in What's the Name of That Book???

Feb 12, 2018 karen rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: roof, pagehabit

despite my joy over twinkle lights and tiny notebooks &etc, i was apprehensive when i got this book in my quarterly literary fiction box from pagehabit. let’s just say this isn’t a good time of year for me to be reading books about suicide OR books where beloved animals might die. but this isn’t a tearjerker by any means - for a book about grief, it’s almost entirely cerebral, and most of the emotional responses to death are centered in the behavior of the dog whose master has just died.

it’s som ...more

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Sep 23, 2019 El rated it really liked it

Shelves: 21st-centurylit, library-borrow, peer-pressure

(Special thanks to Leah for gifting me her ticket to see Nunez speak tonight because Leah was called away for work. Love you, my friend.)

I always cringe a little at the "darkly funny" descriptor that appears on certain book covers. As we all know by now, satire doesn't work for me and what other people find funny in literature barely get a smile from me. So I picked this up with some trepidation because I'm an asshole who has trouble with humor.

The narrator of this book is a woman who has recent (Special thanks to Leah for gifting me her ticket to see Nunez speak tonight because Leah was called away for work. Love you, my friend.)

I always cringe a little at the "darkly funny" descriptor that appears on certain book covers. As we all know by now, satire doesn't work for me and what other people find funny in literature barely get a smile from me. So I picked this up with some trepidation because I'm an asshole who has trouble with humor.

The narrator of this book is a woman who has recently lost her longtime best friend. His wife doesn't want to be saddled with the dog her friend left behind, so she asks the narrator to take it on. It's a Great Dane which is a small dog and probably doesn't belong in a small apartment in NYC, though I have no experience with that myself.

The narrator doesn't even want the dog, so here I am thinking I'm going to hate this story because of poor treatment. And, just as in any movie, I worry that something will happen to the dog in the end because animals get the worst treatment in movies, especially horror movies. It's traumatizing, because I love animals and I love horror movies, so I am constantly conflicted and full of angst. I generally don't read literature that features an animal for similar reasons. I don't want to cry, dammit.

But this book actually is good, isn't it. Nunez is a skillful writer, if this book is any indication. And it's award-winning, so maybe it is a good indication. The story reads quickly, in part because it's a short novel, and in part because Nunez has a way with words that makes it easy to relate:

My friend is also writing about her mother.

Writers love quoting Milosz: When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.

After I put my mother in a novel she never forgave me.

Rather than, say, Toni Morrison, who called basing a character on a real person an infringement of copyright. A person owns his life, she says. It's not for another to use it for fiction.
(p57)

We get to know the narrator and her best friend who died suddenly through, basically, the narrator's observations on the dog, her life as it was before and how it is now, and her thoughts on life. I learned at Nunez's talk that Nunez keeps a commonplace journal, essentially a notebook (in her case she keeps a file on her computer) that she adds quotes or thoughts or ideas into, some of which makes it way into her writing.

Man and dog. Did it really all begin, as animal experts think, with nursing mothers taking orphaned wolf cubs to their breasts to suckle along with their babies? And doesn't this fit nicely with the myth of the twin founders of Rome? Romulus and Remus, abandoned at birth, warmed and suckled by a she-wolf.

A pause here to wonder why we call a womanizer a wolf. Given that the wolf is known for being a loyal, monogamous mate and devoted parent.
(p81)

The observations are not dissimilar to the observations many of us have in our daily lives. For example, I just talked with a friend this weekend on a road trip about this very topic:

It is one of the great bafflements of student fiction. I have read that college students can spend up to ten hours a day on social media. But for the people they write about - also mostly college students - the internet barely exists.

Cell phones do not belong in fiction, an editor once scolded in the margin of one of my manuscripts, and ever since - more than two decades now - I have wondered at the disconnect between tech-filled life and techless story.
(p102)

This is a charming little story about how grief can affect a person, the connections we make with animate or inanimate objects upon the loss of someone we love, the way we almost lose sight of ourselves unless we have something to hold onto. It's real, all of it, and that's why readers can connect to this story. ...more

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Apr 06, 2025 Noreen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: books-read-in-2025

A brilliant, beautiful novel about friendship, love, aging, loss—and dogs. Profoundly affecting.

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Feb 21, 2018 Lauren rated it liked it · review of another edition

I didn't dislike this but it left me a bit cold. It felt like an essay on mourning and writing or the bonds between an animal and a human, but not quite both and not a novel. There were aspects of it I liked very much - I am a sucker for a not-quite-reliable narrator - and I always like reading about NYC. But the neither fish nor fowl-ness of the narrative was not for me.

But many many thanks to the Goodreads Early readers program for sending me a copy of the nolvel in exchange for a review.

Not ...more

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Apr 18, 2019 Lara rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: own, dogs, very-favorites, national-book-award, grief, 2019

There is so much accordioned into this slim novel about love and grief and friendship and living in the world - the book seems like a magic trick in itself. I'm deeply grateful for it, and for Apollo most of all. ...more

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Dec 07, 2018 Misha rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: academia, poc-author, friendship, doorway-prose, literary, asian-american, new-york, death, female-protagonist, rape

"If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away." (8)

TW: suicide, child-trafficking

This feels like a return to form for Nunez. It reminded me quite a bit of A Feather on the Breath of God. It is also autobiographical in feel if not truth, including reflections on ruminations of writers and philosophers. There is a fragmented coherence, much like in Maggie Nelson's work, where the side thoughts of the narrator form th ...more

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Jun 12, 2020 Candice rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

When I first heard about this book I thought it would be a light chick lit read. Woman and dog. Dog-lover that I am, I became slightly disappointed whenever several pages went by without mention of the dog. But as I got more and more into the book I realized what a treasure it is. Lots of musings on death, loneliness, writing, and canine companionship. There were some references to books about animals and to situations where the animals were not treated well. Nothing graphic, but probably more t ...more

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Jul 18, 2021 Chrissie rated it it was amazing

I picked this up like six times, read the back, and thought “Huh?!?! Dogs? Suicide? Wait, why did we buy this?”

Then I finally read it.

WHOA! Front runner for best book I read in 2021.

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